Kathy and I took a trip down to REI yesterday. I was looking to get a few things to start filling out my biking wardrobe. I'm not willing to get into the whole spandex side of things, but there's only so many times you can wear board shorts and a t-shirt, and on the few cooler days we've had I've started to notice my lack of options.

My priority right now is figuring out a good options for pants to ride in. Again, I'm not into the whole spandex bit, so I guess my fashion choices would tend more toward messenger style apparel. Maybe just pants cut a bit short, though breathability might be nice.

But yesterday I instead bought two shirts: the Lightweight MTS Long-Sleeve Crew in "Cavern Red" and the REI Swift Long-Sleeve T-Shirt in "Sharkskin/Dijon". Both are fast-drying and fairly thin long-sleeves that I think will be good for those SoCal days where it's warm during the day but a little cool in the evening.

If you've been reading the blog for a while, you might remember that I signed up for Flexcar in February. I last used the service back in April, when rate hikes made the service less affordable.

I still think the car-sharing idea is a good one, however, so I was very interested today to see in the Council referral email a motion by Eric Garcetti talking about creating a one-year pilot program in Hollywood (PDF).

Reading the motion text, though, it would seem the City's involvement would largely be in providing some visible parking. And they would then turn around and charge the companies a fee for upkeep of the sites. The only part that seems incentivized is the concept of dedicated on-street spots.

The motion asks DOT to report back in 30 days about the possibility of creating the pilot. Before that clock starts, though, the motion goes to the Council's Transportation Committee and then back to the full Council. Eventually, though, this could be a cool idea.

Let me just say that this is a beautiful thing to see in the logs:

running hook: CODE(0x93dbd20)
1127348791: Denied by PostHook: Domain known as spammer.

PostHooks code is now in place. The domain lookup and a very minimal spammer banned words list are registered and running.

I bought my bike computer on July 19th. So that means I've had it basically for two months. Functionally it's a little less since I was in Michigan for a week, so we'll say I've had it for eight weeks. The odometer on the computer reads 356.2 miles. That averages out to about 44 miles per week, which is a good bit less than I'd like to be doing. A major part of that has been the transition to being back in school instead of working every day; I'm riding more days, but it's more like 7 mile days than 20 mile days.

I really need to find more time for some recreational riding. There are plenty of trips that would be cool to take; I just haven't had time lately.

I've found out lately that there are any number of things you can do to crash a Sony Ericsson s710a. For instance, you can go into the pictures and use 'Select Multiple' to choose like twenty pictures you want to delete, while at the same time listening to mp3s. Or you can be listening to music and try to attach four or five images to an email.

Maybe the phone's just trying to tell me it's not a computer.

I've been doing some backend eThreads work lately in preparation for again changing up my spam blocking solution. I'm fed up with false positives in lists like the DSBL (a dynamic IP that had an open SOCKS proxy in 2003 likely doesn't now). Heavy handed blocking has made my stats a lot cleaner, but it's also led to legit people getting blocked and spam's starting to sneak around anyway.

I wanted to put this code into eThreads as plugins and keep the core code cleaner, but to do so I needed a way for plugins to hook into the posting process. That's now in the code, so it's time for the actual plugin development. Hopefully I'll have that up and going within the next few days.

All of this has made me realize that someday I should release a new version. eThreads 1.2 came out in 2000. The whole codebase has been torn down, rewritten, torn down, and rewritten again since then.

My laptop battery appears to be giving up on life. It properly runs from 100% to 50% or so, and then just instantly drops to 2% capacity. So basically I'm getting just a bit over an hour out of it. Very odd. I've got another one back at the apartment. I may have to switch it in.

Yesterday USC opened its 2005 home football schedule at the Coliseum against Arkansas. The game itself was a blow-out; USC won 70-17. That makes 24 straight victories, and 22 straight at home.

This is my fifth year at USC, just as it is Pete Carroll's. The team went 6-6 his (and my) first season, and has progressed rapidly since then. That's certainly made the games a lot more fun, but it's also made them a lot more crowded. Perhaps the place you feel that most is in the student section, where it's now increasingly hard to find a good seat and can almost be dangerous trying to get in when the gates open.

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So on my way to Long Beach this morning I got a ticket. It was an MTA Sheriff's officer (I guess... the ticket has MTA on it), and I was on my bike pulling into the San Pedro Blue Line station.

Now it doesn't surprise me overly much to get a ticket while biking. Some of the things I do on a bike probably aren't 100% legal, though I'm a very safe rider and would never do anything crazy. But in the course of the day there are things you do, like making a left turn onto a crosswalk when transitioning from riding as a vehicle to riding as a pedestrian, that are perfectly safe but probably violate some law.

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In high school they had "Computers" classes where they taught you how to use things like Word and Excel. I never took those classes. I did "independent study computers" and built the school web site.

But tonight some of that might have come in useful. I've been trying to make some charts in gnumeric, to lay out financial info for tomorrow's DLANC meeting. I've successfully figured out how to make the charts, but it would appear that gnumeric has zero support for choosing sensible colors that will show up in grayscale. Does Excel handle that better? How hard can it be to have a "I'm printing in grayscale option" in the properties that alters the behaviour of the code that picks colors?

I was able to manually set bar elements to different gray levels, but pie charts appear to only let you say "Automatic", in which case half of what it picks just shows up as white when run through my laser printer.

I refuse to touch Open Office's oocalc app. I've messed with it before and despise its UI much as I do that of OO's word processor. I also installed kchart (can't find a working website for that one) and couldn't handle (or understand) the UI. gnumeric feels very nice, but pie charts where half the elements come out white aren't very useful to me.

Word of advice: Don't leave your dhcpd.conf file in an unusable state when your server is running headless. A power outage can make it quite a pain to get things back up and running.

I have to say that I was very pleased with my lunch on Saturday. I don't cook very often, but this is one of those meals I can make fairly quickly and without a ton of mess to clean up.

The fried okra is just store-bought frozen stuff that I dump into oil. So nothing special there, but I like it.

The chicken is from frozen boneless breasts that I defrost a bit and then slice into strips. Then I lay down some aluminum foil (for mess containment) and pour some flour onto it. Into that I dump a healthy portion of McCormick Spicy Montreal Steak Seasoning. Mix it around a little, then roll the chicken in it, and throw it in the pan.

Just a little bit later you've got a nice little lunch, and leftovers.

The printer I ordered two days ago came in today (it acutally would have come in yesterday, but a film shoot blocked the building and Fedex didn't deliver). I brought it up to the apartment this evening, and just set it up. Within five minutes I was printing. Installing the Samsung print utilities took 30 seconds and worked perfectly with LPRng, which I installed instead of my mortal enemy CUPS. I just printed the $50 mail-in rebate form, and I'm about to print the invoice.

The ML-2010 does curl the paper a bit, but I think if I get heavier paper it'll take care of that.

Today was the second Friday of September, so that means it was time for Midnight Ridazz. The theme for this month was Heavy Metal and the route took us from Echo Park west on Sunset, up Hillhurst, east on Los Feliz, and evntually over to Eagle Rock. I actually made a cursory attempt to show up in costume. Point to keep in mind for the future: a leather jacket doesn't breathe at all when riding a bike.

Despite getting hot and sweaty, I did make the 10 miles or so of this month's ride in blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a yellow headband. I'm not sure if that's at all heavy metal, but it was the best I could do on short notice.

I think my favorite parts of this ride were the three or times when I stopped to cork an intersection. If you're not familiar, corking's when a few riders will stop and block cross traffic so the group can continue through a changing light. Yes, it's illegal, but when you've got probably 500 bikers in your group you can't afford to let lights break people up.

It's funny watching people in cars as this mass of bikes just keeps going by. I was up at the front of the ride when we hit Los Feliz and I think Griffith Park. I stopped in front of a car sitting at the light waiting to cross, and a couple others joined me. The guy in the car yelled at us to get out of the intersection, and one of the riders told him to calm down, there were going to be a lot of us coming through. He honked and yelled a bit more, but then as more and more bikes kept going through I think he just started laughing. What else can you do when a nearly ten minute stream of cyclists passes by you at 10:30pm?

Anyway, it was another great ride. Anyone with a bike in LA needs to check Midnight Ridazz out.

I spent a good bit of the afternoon and a lot of the evening learning enough Javascript, XML and XSL to get dangerous. This is for a project that I think could be really cool. I spent today hammering on the user side, and now over the weekend I'll really dig into building a cool modperl backend. Hopefully that means I'll have something to show within a week or so. I hate waiting. I want things to just work now.

So basically after I had decided that the ML-2250 was going to be best for Kathy I ended up having to wait until the following day to make the order. And in that time newegg lowered the price of the ML-2010 $20 to $109 (sale still going until 5:30pm tonight). And then there's the $50 mail-in rebate, so really it's a laser printer for $60. That's crazy.

So I bought two.

Well, I ordered one for Kathy, and then because the price was so hard to pass up I decided it was time for me to enter the ranks of those who own printers.

Just to mix things up, though, I ordered one from Amazon and one from newegg, since they both had the same deal going. I figured it to be a little bit of a race to see which would show up first. Neither has shipped yet, but they should today or tomorrow.

I'm looking into printers for Kathy, since her Epson still refuses to play nicely with Linux (even though the model is supposed to be compatible). She's decided that she doesn't really need color, which means I get to look into black and white lasers. Kathy prints a lot of papers, so I think in the long run the cost savings from laser will be substantial.

I hadn't realized until today, though, just how cheap black and white lasers had become. One really tempting option is the Samsung ML-2010, which newegg has for $79 ($129 minus $50 mail-in rebate). It's not at all a bad looking printer, and like all the Samsung lasers I've seen it includes Linux drivers in the box, but I'm thinking that we'll probably end up going with the Samsung ML-2250, which newegg carries for $148 ($168 minus $20 "instant savings"). The difference is in toner capacity -- the 2010 lists 3000 pages, while the 2250 lists 5000. Both toner cartridges are roughly the same price, in the $70 range.

The ML-2250 also supports adding a network card and Postscript support if you want to do so later on. That's not a consideration for Kathy, but it's something I'm a big fan of. These prices make me want to finally buy a printer. Well, a good printer... I've had a Lexmark z43 sitting under my bed for the last year, but I'm over having to fight inkjets.